BOOK SYNOPSIS
When Emma sees the spectral figure lingering on her beach where no person should be lingering, she knows she must do something. Her husband, her beloved Steven has been returned to her only that day. But he’s a changed man. An exhausted, embittered, unresponsive one. And now it’s up to Emma to save him from strange and unseen forces that seem to want to thwart her at every turn.

But what about the woman on the beach? Who is she, and why does she only appear on the nights when lightning flashest its brightest? When it flashes closest to shore? What about the strange staircase Emma glimpses only during the most violent of those lightning storms? A staircase that isn’t even there?

BOOK EXCERPTS
Far out on the horizon, thunder rolled again, its voice deeper now, and more sinister. Lightning brightened the sky beyond the French doors that opened onto the bedroom’s tiny seaside balcony. For a fraction of an instant, the sky glowed brighter than day. Then it went dark again, a velvety and featureless void to eyes that struggled, unable to adjust so quickly to such pronounced and startling changes.

Uncertain, drawn by some fascination that seemed to have nothing to do with common sense, nothing to do with any kind of sense at all, Emma took a few steps toward the doors.

She tried to tell herself a storm over the open Atlantic was nothing unusual. Nothing to be concerned about. Not even if it was the first she’d seen in the nearly eight weeks since she’d moved into Bridal Wreath. So, then, why did she stand in quaking terror, on legs that seemed momentarily frozen to immovable ice, squarely in the middle of the dark and silent room, staring at the dim oblong of the French doors?

Why did her stomach tighten, and grow heavy with dread? Why did her breath come in rasps and her ears strain, listening as if her life depended upon it?

Outside!

The suggestion seemed to spring from inside her head, whispered in a voice that was not her own, or one she’d heard before.

On the beach!

With the whisper came a whiff of new scent... an elusive phantom’s breath of barely-remembered sweetness.

Roses.

The scent of them was nothing more than a lingering suggestion of perfume, musty and long-forgotten, as if it had been too long held prisoner in some enclosed, dry and dusty space. Mixing with the stronger aroma of lavender only to be overcome by it, the rose-perfume vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

Slowly, her heart jerking painfully, her feet guided as if someone... an entity to match that disembodied whisper...? had taken control of her body, Emma crossed the room and stepped onto the balcony.

A woman stood on the beach.

Pale and fluttering, she shimmered in deepest darkness beneath a tangled clump of the white-blossomed shrubs that had given the house its name, in the very place where shadows hung thickest over the retaining wall that separated the lawn from the strip of rough sand below.

Except that the retaining wall no longer stood. It lay in ruins at the woman’s feet, a shambles of broken mortar and strewn stone barely visible against dawn-pale sand.

This was the crash that had awakened Emma.

And the woman?

"Frannie?" Emma’s cry was barely audible.

The woman on the beach had to be Steven’s sister. She could be no other. Not on this stretch of beach. Not so far from the village. Not at this hour of night-about-to-become-morning. And yet...

There was something different about her. Something indefinable, yet subtly... wrong.

The woman... Frannie... remained motionless. Staring out to sea, she seemed transfixed by the distant flickering of the storm. Luminescent skirts foamed around her ankles, and a cloud of shadow-darkened hair floated around her shoulders.

Seized by a chill that, like the commanding whisper that had drawn her to this place and this moment, seemed to spring from deep within, Emma waited. Breathless.

After a long, long pause, Frannie... if it really was Frannie... turned her head. As if Emma’s whispered cry had been a shout, she looked up at the house... looked directly at the balcony. Lifting an arm clad in a billowing sleeve, she made a sweeping gesture toward the storm, and the first ruddy streaks of dawn that had joined it on the horizon.

"Frannie?" Though Emma tried to raise her voice, this cry was as quavering and without substance as the first, so thin and weak it couldn’t possibly reach the woman on the beach. "What are you doing down there?"

"What are you doing, yourself?" Steven’s sister spoke from the doorway at Emma’s back.

Stifling a scream, Emma lurched around.

AUTHOR BIO
Born and raised in the northwestern corner of Pennsylvania, Kay LeGrand always felt she belonged somewhere else. Following a family vacation to Colorado at the age of ten, she knew that place was the American west. Today, she and her husband live in a condo overlooking the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, from which she draws her inspiration.

A writer from the age when she was first able to hold a pen, Kay wrote for newspapers in high school and college, and ultimately received a degree in journalism and communications. Among the many jobs she’s held, Kay has enjoyed working as a late-night radio disk jockey, a waitress at an amusement park cafeteria, an airborne traffic reporter, and a telephone operator. A second-generation pilot, she worked as a commercial pilot and flight instructor for several years, and is now happily making hotel reservations for several national parks.

Conventionality is not morality. ... Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.
Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out. Vaclav Havel